Tuesday, 23 December 2014

A headline from the website of my old
local paper in the UK says "A police operation to curb car crime
in Wolverhampton has seen a six-fold reduction in thefts from
vehicles" but what exactly is a "six-fold" drop. If
there were sixty crimes before is it a drop by one-sixth (to 50) or a
drop to one sixth (that is 10) or perhaps a drop that is actually
six-fold and six times the original number of crimes are now NOT
recorded (a staggering -300 crimes). Mathematics is clearly not the
strong suit of editors.

Monday, 22 December 2014

Part I
After weeks of being asked by my school
to use the computers I wrote a computer lesson for this week. Halfway
into the first lesson of the day (with four to go) there was a power
failure at the school which means it will now be off for at least the
rest of the day.

This is why I don't write computer
lessons. And that's what I will tell them next time they try to
insist. (I did have a plan B!)

I learned my lesson on this back in
England when the college I taught at decided to replace all the
whiteboards with smartboards and then had the lot break down leaving
all the classrooms with literally nowhere to write anything. In
classroom situations I firmly believe the lower tech the better.

Part II

More reasons NOT to put computers in
classrooms.

My classrooms all have computers that
project onto retractable screens which raise or lower in front of the
whiteboards. I've mentioned before the problems with preparing
detailed whiz-bang computer lessons only to arrive and find the
computer isn't working or there has been a power failure. This week I
had another problem. My lesson has no computer content but three
times out of thirteen lessons (so far) I've arrived in class to find
the retractable screens broken and stuck in the down position. This
has meant teaching without a board to write on as the board has been
wholly covered by the screen which I can't write on. From now I'll
always have a "no materials/no board" back up plan too.
Computers in classrooms seem superficially to be a good idea but in
my experience they are more trouble than they are worth. To quote
Scotty from Star Trek, "The more you complicate the plumbing the
easier it is to stop up the drains."

Sunday, 21 December 2014

This last minute thing about China is
really baffling at times.A couple of weeks ago, at 7 pm on Sunday night, I
got a call telling me that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday they had
exams so I didn't have to go in. How can you NOT know until Sunday
night that you have exams on Monday? How do the students manage to
revise?

I've mentioned before that crossing the
road in China is a dangerous thing to do.Drivers and riders routinely
ignore signals and markings, drive on the wrong side of the road and
generally show zero awareness of any other road user, motorised or
pedestrian. So I was surprised on my way home today to see that the
Yangshuo authorities had stationed some traffic wardens at the
crossroads at the end of the street.

What were they doing to help safety?
Good question. Normally people here, me included, also ignore the
lights and cross when it seems safe to do so, whether it's the little
green man or the little red man showing. These "wardens"
were forcibly stopping this activity then making people cross with
the green light. They were doing nothing at all about the traffic or
the danger. When I tried to cross because the road was empty one blew
his whistle and angrily pushed me back onto the pavement. When the
light turned to green he pushed me out into the traffic where I was
almost run over by a moped coming from the wrong direction and had to
run to dodge a coach that had run the red light. I can't help
thinking that their time would be better spent enforcing the traffic
regulations.

Oh yes, almost forgot, when I had
safely made it to the other side I counted them. On that one junction
I saw NINETEEN of these people, all, apparently, hell bent on
increasing the pedestrian kill rate.

... BBC was
showing news of a state visit to France, a "Woman's Hour"
style program called "Mainly For Women", Andy Pandy on
Watch With Mother, Michael Bond's "Napoleon's Day Out (about an
escaped parrot), a film about a school trip to Icecland, Nat Temple
And His Orchestra, Vera Lynn SIngs, a documentary about Adolf Hitler,
a comedy play set in Wales, an interview about the budget with the
Chancellor of the Exchequer - Peter Thorneycroft, M.P. , and an
episode of an American comedy series - I Married Joan.

Sounds like a belter of a night. TV was
just a little different back then.

Of course you should have received this by email but I always manage to miss someone off the list, so this is for anyone inadvertently omitted.

It's been a mixed sort of year.

It started off with me confined to my
apartment in Baiyin with my leg in plaster, missing planned parties
and a holiday in Shanghai. Not, it has to be said, my most optimistic
hour. While that was happening it also became clear that I wouldn't
be able, for various reasons, to continue in that city for another
year. As that's where Teresa lives it still didn't raise my spirits.
I would be there for another term and then have to move. So, in June,
I moved to Yangshuo, which is about a thousand miles away. The
intervening months were, as you might expect, a bittersweet time. We
determined that we would try to maintain our relationship but both of
us knew that such a long distance would make things difficult.

Down in Yangshuo the job and the school
turned out to be pretty good and the city certainly has a lot of
advantages (and a few disadvantages). I'm happy in my school and I
have a great (if very cold) apartment. I have plenty of western
friends here though virtually no Chinese ones – it's a town full of
ex-pats. I get to go to bars and quizzes and even to perform my
writing in front of people who speak the same language!

All that is good.

Not so good is that I have seen Teresa
for a total of ten days in the last six months – just two visits.
We talk a lot on the phone but it looked for a while as if we would
split up – we actually agreed that we would – but somehow we are
struggling on.

I'll be up to visit her in January
before a brief trip back to the UK and then it's back here to run
another teacher orientation course before starting the new term.

With less than a week to go to
Christmas things are looking quite good for the next couple of
months. I'll be out reading poetry on Tuesday night, at a Christmas
buffet in one of the bars on Wednesday night, hosting a Christmas
quiz on Christmas Day, chilling at a movie in my local bar on Friday
night, back for more poetry the following Tuesday, at a half-prize
closing down party in Demo bar on the day before New Years Eve, at a
New Years party on New Years Eve and finishing school on 10th
January to fly to Baiyin on 12th. The expat community
here is nothing if not lively.

Fun as all that sounds. I'd still
rather be having a quieter time in Baiyin. At least when I had my leg
in plaster Teresa could come and visit me every day. I don't think
I'll be able to move back to Baiyin as there isn't a job there for
me, but I will probably try to get somewhere closer than here next
year. I'll be looking into that as soon as I get back from England.

Anyway, as it's Christmas, it's time I
wrote another festive greeting for everyone.

Friday, 19 December 2014

I have, at the school's insistence,
begun to do oral English exams for all the students. Today I have
done one hundred and eighty five exams in two hundred and forty
minutes which includes the admin time of writing down th names and
grades.

My multiple choice question to you is
this.

Do you think this exercise

a) will yield a great deal of useful
information about the students' levels and progress

b)will yield some data that will
require careful and detailed analysis

c) will yield only a little meaningful
data but nevertheless data that can inform and guide future lessons

or

d) will yield absolutely no data at all
and is a pointless waste of the two lessons per class that it is
taking up, and is only being done so that school can say that it has
been done.

Yes. d) was my answer too.

Part II

Another hundred or so tested today in
the continuing exercise in futility. I did get one laugh though as I
relentlessly dumbed-down the questions for the weakest students.
Asking one student "What is your favourite animal?" he
managed to latch onto the word "favourite" and plucked a
word that he thought might fit from his limited vocabulary and
answered "water melon".

On the downside In have rarely felt so
frustrated at doing pointless tasks in my life as I have felt this
week and I'm only about a third of the way through it.

Sixty more tomorrow, then a week off
for a Christmas lesson then the other half of the students in the
week after Christmas and the classes I missed on Monday in the last
of my teaching weeks this term

Part III

And now the School has cancelled the
Monday and Tuesday classes in the week I was going to do exams
(couldn't do them this week as they were cancelled too!) which means
that those classes will have to do their exam next week and will not
have the fun and games Christmas lesson the other classes are having.

Part IV

Honesty isn't always good for the ego.
During one of the oral exams today I asked a girl, "What is your
favourite lesson?" and she answered "I like your lesson'"
As I had done with every other student that I asked this question I
followed up with "Why?" and was told "Because you
don't give us homework."

And having looked at an article that
lists the pick of the Christmas TV, this is one of those times. Call
me picky if you like but with Strictly Come Dancing, Paul O'Grady and
Miranda all on Christmas Day I can safely do without it. Granted that
there is Doctor Who but there is also Call The Midwife and Downton
Abbey. Of course there is the repeat of Still Open All Hours which is
worthwhile enough in its way but is, all the same, a repeat. So, on
the whole, I'm really rather happy to be somewhere that isn't England
and to be missing all the Christmas treats on TV.

Today I had to teach my Tuesday classes
extra lessons in one of those "working the weekend because they
gave us a day off in the week" situations. As it was just one
day's classes I pulled out an off-the-shelf lesson. It's an old
standard the main activity of which is for groups of students to list
ten items they would take if stranded on a desert island. I've had
some weird answers in the past but few as weird as one of the groups
in my strong class. I don't know what they expected to find on the
island but their list included TNT, C4, AK-47s, RK-62s and,
bizarrely, a Gatling gun. An impressive knowledge of military
hardware, historical and modern, but perhaps not the answer I was looking for.

Well, I had hoped to do some Chinese
lessons now that I'm here in Yangshuo but I just went to visit the
school and it doesn't look possible. The sensibly priced courses are
during the day when I'm working, and evenings and weekends are one to
one private lessons only which would need half my salary to get a
reasonable amount of time and practice. Looks as if I'll just have to
keep on struggling by with pointing at things. It's a strategy that mostly work but fails utterly to persuade the bus driver to stop at the place where I wish to get off.

My computer doesn't like Dave. Not any
actual living acquaintance named Dave, Dave the TV channel. How do I
know? Well, a while back I had a problem where my computer (probably because the monitor was exhibiting a known Dell fault) would randomly shut down with a message saying "Digital Input
Detected: Entering Power Save Mode"? Well that fault went away,
but now it's back... but only when I try to use the "watch
again" function on Dave. I can use the BBC iPlayer without
problems and I can use the ITV player but Dave on Demand shuts down
randomly between five and thirty minutes into anything I try to
watch. Anybody got any ideas why this should be? I suspect my
computer just doesn't care for comedy repeats.